Omen (4)
The Cultists assigned to the Angora-class fast frigate of the mothership battle group were, comparatively speaking, the lucky ones.
Five days earlier, they had been struck by the psychic heat beam fired by the Three-Headed Demon and crash-landed onto an island.
Saint Saigil 08 was a demonic realm teeming with dangerous organisms. For beings whose physical capabilities fell below even a human's baseline, it was hardly an environment built for survival.
Had they fallen onto the continent instead, they would not have lasted a single day.
"Do you really think a rescue team will come?"
"Once the magnetic storm dies down, we'll be able to reach the satellites. We just have to hold out until then."
Cultists with horns of every conceivable shape sat around a bonfire, tearing into roasted fish. One had a horn snapped clean off by the impact of the crash; another was wrapped in bandages from head to toe.
They were routed soldiers in all but name, yet all twenty-five of their eyes burned with the will to endure, somehow, no matter what.
"Looking at the sky, the magnetic storm is weaker than yesterday."
"The comms equipment is more or less restored. We're just short a few parts."
"Let's try again tomorrow morning. Technicians, see if you can scavenge parts from the wrecked shipboard fighters."
At the command of the warrior-caste Cultist with goat horns, the others nodded.
"I know it's hard on all of you, but we have to bear it. Many have departed under Providence's guidance, but our time has not yet come."
The Cultists were a race blessed with psychic power, but in this situation it was of little help.
Most psychic techniques consumed enormous amounts of the user's energy. If they had tried using psychic abilities to catch fish or pick fruit, their reserves would have drained in an instant and they would have collapsed on the spot.
Knowing this, the warrior-cultist devoted himself to making sure everyone moved only within their limits. The crew understood his intentions and followed his orders — however frustrated they may have been with their circumstances.
When the meal was finished, they dispersed to their assigned tasks. The warrior-cultist, their leader, trudged tirelessly among them, helping wherever he could.
Time passed, and the sixth night fell upon the island.
The warrior-cultist had scouted the island himself and confirmed it harbored no dangerous creatures. Even so, he had stationed night watches in case something unexpected emerged after dark.
With three sentries on duty, the rest of the survivors had sunk into deep sleep.
"The fire's dying down."
"I'm going to relieve myself — grab some on your way back."
One of the sentries slung his rifle and stepped into the woods.
"Ugh, almost stepped in it."
A little distance from the bonfire, he finished his business, adjusted his trousers, and began gathering the branches scattered around him.
He decided this would be enough and was turning back when a rustling sound reached his ears.
The crunch of leaves and twigs underfoot. He dropped the branches at once and raised his rifle.
"W-who's there?"
He shouted, but no answer came back. One of the other sentries, hearing his cry, came running at once.
"Why are you suddenly yelling?"
"I heard footsteps in the woods just now."
"What?"
The two sentries aimed their rifles toward the source of the sound, but the footsteps had gone silent.
"Must've been your imagination."
"You think so?"
The pair started to head back toward the bonfire.
That was when the strange sound pricked at their ears again. This time, it wasn't mere footsteps.
"Did you hear that?"
"……."
The two held their breath and strained to listen.
The faint murmur of waves rolling beyond the forest. The rustle of leaves stirred by the wind.
And then—
"Is anyone there?"
Small but unmistakably clear, the voice belonged to a female Cultist. One of the crash survivors, it seemed, had made her way to this island.
"W-what do we do? Should we help her?"
"Wait a second. Something's off."
This was hardly their first day on the island — and the island wasn't nearly large enough to be called a continent. It was small enough to circle on foot in half a day; there was no way a Cultist could have gone unnoticed here.
"We've been here for days. There's no other ship on this island."
"Maybe she came from somewhere else? Her, uh, her situation might be better than ours — she could have flown in on a shipboard fighter."
"Well…."
It wasn't wrong, exactly — but they had overlooked something.
Despite the hour, not a single sound of an approaching aircraft had broken the night.
"This is exactly when we need to stick together! Hey! Over here!"
"Wait!"
Before his companion could point any of this out, the Cultist bolted toward the voice, shouting noisily all the way.
"What are you two doing?"
"A woman's voice came from over there just now."
"What?"
The two sentries hesitated for a moment — then, instead of chasing after their runaway comrade, they decided to wake the warrior-cultist. No matter how they turned it over in their minds, that voice felt suspicious.
They were moving toward the bonfire when, from behind the underbrush, came the voice of the very comrade who had run ahead.
"Hey! Give us a hand!"
"Huh?"
"We're from the escort ship out of Jasbil 02! Don't worry!"
"That's right! We ran into trouble hauling our fighter over here."
"Come help us, please."
The voices drifting from beyond the brush weren't just one. Many had come, apparently — the shouts rang out from all directions at once.
There was no hint of threat in their runaway friend's voice. Only the joy of finding kin after so long.
"Strange. We never heard any aircraft."
"Guess we missed it somehow. Let's go take a look."
And so the last two sentries let their guard down. They pushed through the brush, following the voices.
The trees growing on the island weren't especially tall, but it was the dead of night. Even with the lights mounted on their rifles, men who were not combat-trained would find the pitch-dark forest punishing going.
As if they understood this, the voices of the Cultists emerged at just the right moments.
"This way!"
"Here! Over here!"
"Just a little farther!"
As if they were straining to keep the pair from wandering even a step off course.
When the voices finally led them out of the forest, they arrived not at a clearing but at a beach. Perhaps worn down by the waves, the sand had been scooped out into a broad, deep hollow — and there, a female Cultist in reinforced armor stood alone.
"What is this? Where are the others?"
The female Cultist gave no answer to the sentry's question. She only stared at them, her face utterly expressionless.
The owners of the voices that had been ringing out from every direction moments ago were nowhere to be seen. Neither was the fighter they claimed to have flown in on.
Just as they sensed something going terribly wrong—
One of the sentries, gazing out at the rolling surf, felt that something was off.
Huh?
The waves should have surged up onto the beach, but instead they were breaking against empty air, as though some invisible thing stood in their path.
The instant he registered how unnatural it was, the Cultist became aware of a strange smell hanging somewhere nearby.
It seeped faintly through the air — a sickening stench fundamentally different from the salty tang of the sea.
He wasn't the only one who felt it. The companion beside him stumbled backward, his gaze snagged on something grotesque: the shadow of the woman standing alone on the sand.
Following his friend's eyes to that shadow, the Cultist felt every hair on his body stand on end.
At first he'd thought the sand beneath them was simply darkened by water. It wasn't.
Every last patch of black sand before them was a shadow.
"Leaving?"
The female Cultist's form rippled like heat haze. At the same instant, the shadows began to writhe.
And then came the voices.
"Going somewhere without us?"
"Don't leave us behind."
"Stay with us."
"Stay with us."
As the voices of their kin rang out, the shadows surged over them.
The warrior-cultist of the Angora-class fast frigate woke to a nameless sense of dread.
Goat-horned Cultists are generally known for their mastery of body-reinforcement psychic techniques. He had entered the warrior caste to play to his own strengths — but he possessed one gift that set him apart from the rest.
An extraordinary sense for danger.
Thanks to his ability to sense peril faster than his comrades, he had cheated death on the battlefield more times than he could count.
He had planned, in fact, to retire from the warrior caste once this mission ended and begin preparing for the prophet trials. His talent fell far short of the true prophets', but talent was talent — with discipline, he'd have no great trouble.
In any case, a danger sense bordering on precognition had just gone off without warning.
The warrior-cultist snatched up the weapon laid at his side and reinforced his five senses with psychic power.
His sharpened ears caught every small sound drifting from outside the mess tent, one by one.
"So we just detach this part?"
"Yep. Combine it with this component, and it'll be operational as soon as we mount it."
"I see. Anything else we need?"
"If you're taking it, you should bring this along too."
What he heard was the sound of a male and female Cultist talking.
The night watch?
His kin were chatting away with perfect composure — this was nowhere near a crisis. And yet the alarm in his head kept ringing, louder and louder.
Get out of here. Now.
And there was one more fact he could not ignore.
Among this survivor group, there was no female Cultist.
…….
After a moment's agonizing, the warrior-cultist resolved to see the situation with his own eyes. Heart hammering, hands trembling, he lifted the tent's curtained flap just a crack.
And he regretted it immediately.
"Good. This should do nicely."
In the wrecked ship a short distance from the tent was a thing so vast that no single glance could take it all in.
A monster of monstrous, never-before-seen aspect was calmly dismantling the ships with its long, sinuous arms.
"S-so, you'll spare us, then?"
"I-I worked hard too! Please spare me too!"
"Damn it! Me as well!"
What was more horrifying still was the something on its back. Five deathly pale Cultist faces were embedded in its flesh like boils, weeping and begging over and over to be spared. Among them was a face the warrior-cultist recognized.
"I've told you everything I know! Please—!"
"Quiet."
When a smooth, feminine voice flowed from the monster's mouth, the wailing faces fell silent at once. Its milk-white eyes rolled — and fixed on the warrior-cultist's tent.
"There you are."
As his gaze met the creature's, the warrior-cultist could only wish that all of it were a dream.
Got everything I needed.
There was plenty of time left before the Nightmare Horizon's cooldown expired, so I had been visiting the crash sites Mother of the Sky had flagged, collecting components to bolster the new frigate's armament.
Can't have too much firepower.
The stronger the ship grew, the more weapons I could put to use through its corruption.
Today's day six. We can lift off tomorrow.
Laden with the new parts and ship weapons on my back, I was swimming back toward the Saintopia 02 continent.
This was the last site. The other ships had gone down on entirely different continents — far too distant to bother with.
Though it has been a while since I last used the Mimic Organ and Human-Faced Beast combo.
Both were traits I'd relied on heavily in the game. And in truth, the two shared an important synergy that was never officially documented.
With the Human-Faced Beast trait, I can choose which victim the Mimic Organ imitates.
Ordinarily, the moment the Mimic Organ consumed new genes, it discarded its stored genes and replaced them with the fresh ones. Which meant that every time I ate, the face my pheromones projected changed.
And that's precisely the Mimic Organ's weakness.
The inability to switch my pheromonic disguise to a target of my own will.
Between the creeping sense of wrongness that came with growing bulk, and the fact that impersonating a specific target was so limited, the Mimic Organ became nearly unusable in the late game.
That's how it's supposed to work, anyway.
But once the Human-Faced Beast trait entered the picture, everything changed.
The Human-Faced Beast works by copying an enemy's genetic profile and storing it within the body. The reason I could interrogate absorbed victims and wring information from them was that consuming them also let me take fragments of their memories.
And the crucial part: the Mimic Organ can draw on those stored genetic profiles.
Pick any one of the profiles saved inside me, and I could produce the pheromones needed to disguise myself as that person.
Almost nobody knows this.
As far as I was aware, I was the only player who ever used the two traits together. The Mimic Organ itself was rare enough that scarcely anyone had even tried pairing them.
I made a lot of people miserable with it, though.
After I'd humiliated enough players with the Mimic Organ, counter-strategies started circulating among them — demanding secret codes only the real person would know, or dangling bait to exploit the fact that a fresh meal meant the old disguise was gone for good, and so on.
But none of them ever learned that I had a means to shift between many faces at will.
Not that it's without drawbacks.
The Human-Faced Beast can store a maximum of five genetic profiles. Which meant I could imitate at most five different people at any given time.
It'd be lovely if I could raise that limit somehow.
In the game, no method to do so existed no matter how hard I searched.
But in this world, maybe things are different.
Elements that never existed in the game kept surfacing here — somewhere in this universe, there might be a way to push past the Human-Faced Beast's limits.
I was mulling this over as I swam when a familiar wave-pattern brushed against my senses.
｢Big Baby!｣
At some point No. 26 had come fluttering up to me, waving her fins. Far in the distance, on the moonlit sand, I could make out the small figures of Mother of the Sky and Adhai.
[Zz zzzzzz zzz (Why did you come all the way out here?)]
｢I was bored, so I went for a swim.｣
The girl answered with a bright, sunny thought-wave. True to her marine nature, she did seem to love the water.
Well, we leave this planet tomorrow.
Once we reached our next destination, there'd be precious little chance to swim for a long while. Better to let her enjoy her favorite pastime to her heart's content while she still could.
[Zzz zz zzz (Then let's swim together)]
｢Yeah!｣
And so No. 26 and I enjoyed one last swim in this planet's night sea.
In the very heart of the abyssal black of space.
A small ship was crossing the boundless void.
Anyone with even a passing interest in spacecraft would have recognized the ivory-colored, oval-hulled vessel at a glance: a Cultist escape craft.
And anyone with a somewhat deeper expertise would also have noted that its stern — the faster-than-light engine assembly — had been severely damaged.
Being unable to make an FTL jump in the vastness of space was a grave problem indeed. All the more so for an escape craft carrying only minimal rations and medical supplies.
Inside the beautifully designed vessel, its two occupants were waiting, day by day, for the day they would die.
"Captain, this is the last of the rations."
"I'm not hungry. You eat it."
"I can't do that. You haven't touched a thing in three days."
They were the captain and crewman who had escaped from the Imperial Mothership Judge of Damos 08.
During the final evacuation, the blast of the mothership's explosion had wrecked their FTL engine. Now they were stranded, adrift in the middle of open space.
The escape craft's cruising speed was very high, but without a working FTL drive, reaching the Cult sphere of influence would take them a good half year at minimum. hopelessly beyond the reach of a vessel stocked with only a week's worth of food.
In other words, two choices remained to them: death by starvation, or suicide.
"Captain. I made a promise to the others. I told them I wouldn't let you throw your life away."
"……."
"Please. Help me keep that promise."
"…Fine. Half, then."
Just as the crewman was handing over half his combat ration, the ship jolted to a sudden halt.
"What was that? Spacedogs, maybe?"
"Checking now!"
The two scrambled to their consoles to find out why the ship had stopped.
"Captain!"
"…Someone is dragging our ship in by force."
It was possible — barely — that a Cultist ship had stumbled upon them, but the odds were slim.
The star system they were passing through was empty space claimed by no faction. Perfect hiding ground for the Spacedogs, who made enemies of every power in existence.
"Haha. It seems Providence has come to gather us in."
"…Then we fight to the end."
They took up the weapons stored aboard the escape craft. Soon, the shriek of a plasma cutter sounded against the hull near the door.
"Gulp."
"…Now!"
The instant the severed door dropped away, they charged.
They had starved for days, but the captain was a veteran of countless battlefields. Drawing up the last dregs of his psychic power, he moved to strike down the enemy.
But his foe was far more adept than he had imagined. Dressed in a white suit, slender of frame, the enemy brushed aside the captain's attack with casual ease, morphed an arm into a blade, and leveled it at his throat.
"Urk?!"
"Stop."
"Captain!"
By then, the other crewman had already been subdued by a second figure in a bizarre suit that looked like a walker fused with reinforced armor.
"We do not surrender to Spacedogs."
"Spacedogs? Do I look like a Spacedog to you?"
The one pinning the captain down replied in a cool, low voice. Only then did the captain get a proper look at his captor.
The opponent with such formidable combat skills was, astonishingly, a woman — with a long horn jutting from the left side of her head.
"You're a Cultist… no. Identify yourself."
The woman answered.
"My name is Sihyeon Yujin. Captain Nern of the Judge of Damos 08 — I have come for you."
"Yujin? Don't tell me — the Yujin family of MegaCorp?"
Sihyeon Yujin — Noble Capital magnate of MegaCorp and former Shadow of the Yujin family — had come for those who had failed their purification mission.